Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [90]
‘Fascinating!’ the Doctor exclaimed. ‘I had expected that the planes would be of a flying wing design, with the engines mounted above the wing. This dorsal-mounted engine would be impossible to detect using ground-based radar.’
‘There is another type?’ enquired Steinmann.
No,’ the Doctor assured him quickly, ‘but that’s the key, isn’t it? This plane is invisible.’
‘That thing’s got a shroud?’ Chris snorted. Munin was anything but invisible. Theoretically it was possible to bend light waves around an object, but the technology required was almost impossible to maintain, even in Chris’s time. It required knowledge of force fields, gravitronics, computer management systems and lasers. It was incredibly energy intensive. If Hartung could build force fields and lasers, why bother with making his plane invisible? He could make it invulnerable instead — that would be a weapon worth having.
The Doctor was shaking his head.
‘Have a closer look,’ the German invited. The Doctor stepped forward, reaching up as high as he could and brushing his hand along the nosecone. Chris followed his example. The surface was irregular, uneven. Tiny little pyramids of black rubber covered the plane. The surface had then been coated in some rough paint.
‘Munin is covered in a revolutionary new carbon foam,’
Steinmann announced.
‘It acts as a Jaumann absorber,’ the Doctor remarked, poking it experimentally.
Chris struggled to remember what the jargon meant.
‘You’ve lined the walls of your hangar with it, too,’ he noted, not wanting to be left out.
‘Very observant. As well as absorbing light and radar energy, the material makes almost perfect soundproofing.’
‘Hartung has built the first radar-invisible plane. A stealth bomber.’
Chris looked again. It certainly had primitive stealth characteristics. The plane had no sharp edges: the wing surfaces and tips were rounded, the tail was almost pear-shaped. The plane’s outer surface was free of any scoops or ridges. The air intakes were as small as they could be and there were no protruding antennae. There was virtually nothing to bounce a radar beam off: no breaks in the skin, no right angles, no wing fences. He hadn’t seen the back of the plane yet, but he imagined that the heat emissions were controlled in some way.
Not just radar-invisible, Doktor. Look closer.’ Steinmann indicated the side of the plane.
The Doctor peered up. ‘Yehudi lights!’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Steinmann said. Chris was puzzled too, and the Doctor was only too happy to explain.
‘That’s what the Americans call them. They would normally be used to light up engine intakes and other places where shadows build up, but here they are arranged all over the surface of the plane. The exact colour of a camouflaged plane isn’t that important, believe it or not, it’s all to do with its shape and the way light falls on it. The human mind can be tricked into thinking that a flying object isn’t a plane if it is lit in an unusual way and makes the silhouette look odd.
Remarkable.’
Chris wasn’t impressed. ‘It’s not terribly advanced, is it?’
The Doctor had that faraway look again. ‘Ten years ago aeroplanes were built out of balsa wood and canvas. Any plane in production now could outperform them.’
Chris could easily have tracked Munin using a gravity displacement sensor, or a mass detector. Hartung, of course, wouldn’t even suspect that such equipment existed. In twenty years’ time, any reasonably competent operator could have spotted the plane using radar, but Munin was certainly stealthy enough to slip past the primitive radar they had in 1941. In a war where everyone was using state-of-the-art technology, being only a couple of years more advanced than your enemy made all the difference. Some Adjudicator instinct buzzed a warning.
‘How long does it take to design and build a plane like this?’ he found himself asking.
Steinmann was only too happy to tell him. ‘First, we work out what sort of planes we need.